Josefien Groot

Josefien is a 24-year-old enthusiastic and ambitious changemaker who is determined to improve the world, by enterprising and innovation, when it comes to sustainability and social equality. She established and sold her first company under the age of 21, with which she sold yoga leggings made from recycled plastic bottles. During her MSc study at the TU Delft, she started Qlayers together with Ruben Geutjens in August 2017. Qlayers develops a new revolutionary coating head that can apply functional coatings on large surfaces. Qlayers is the only company worldwide that is able to print 'sharkskin' microstructures and apply them on large industrial surfaces. For this reason, Qlayers was featured in the 10 Dutch Breakthrough Technologies for 2018 by StartupDelta and was selected as one of the 500 most promising deep-tech startups world-wide by the Hello Tomorrow summit 2017 and 2018. In addition, Qlayers won the ASN Bank Wereldprijs 2018 in the category Climate Change. Also, Qlayers was a national finalist of Chivas Venture 2019 and the Offshore Wind Innovation Awards 2018.

Personally, Josefien loves to play sports, be in nature, read books and develop herself. She is a pusher and very driven in everything she does. She won the national championship of boxing in 2012 in the Netherlands (C, 60kg) and got the third place on the national championship of powerlifting in 2017. Josefien's lifequote: ''Nothing is impossible, the word itself says 'I'm possible'!''